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It’s rare for a college basketball story to enter the mainstream sports conversation on Christmas Eve, but Baylor’s announcement that it had added center James Nnaji — the 31st pick in the 2023 NBA Draft – was enough of a “What are we doing here?” moment for it to break through.

Though college sports is now professional in almost every sense — including players who have signed pro contracts in Europe and the NBA G League finding their way to college basketball this year — the Nnaji development feels like new territory. This isn’t someone who slipped through the cracks or got bad advice, turned pro out of high school and ran into a career dead end. Nnaji, who has been playing in Europe, was one draft slot away from being a first-round pick with a guaranteed NBA contract. He played in the NBA Summer League and has even been part of a trade.

“Santa Claus is delivering mid season acquisitions…this s*** is crazy!!” UConn coach Dan Hurley wrote on X shortly after the news became public.

Is this really the type of player who should be part of college basketball? Who knows, maybe Arizona can get LeBron James on the bench for its Final Four push if he wants to play with his son Bryce.

That would be absurd, of course — and, to be clear, expressly against NCAA rules since these pro-to-college cases must take place within five years of high school — but you can be forgiven if it seems like anything goes these days.

And guess what? As more college programs pursue mid-year additions, some have even checked in with G League players on two-way contracts who have appeared in actual NBA games. That seems inevitable at some point, too, given where this trend seems to be headed.

But don’t blame Baylor or any program for pursuing those players.

While you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in college sports who thinks this is a good development, schools are merely doing what the NCAA has given them the green light to do as it waits and hopes for some kind of antitrust protection from Congress that would allow for the actual enforcement of the rulebook rather than a mishmash of eligibility rulings.

It’s tempting to wail away on the NCAA’s ineffectiveness here, especially if you’re, say, a Kentucky fan who remembers when the NCAA denied Enes Kanter’s eligibility because he received $33,000 over his necessary living expenses from a pro team in Turkey. That seems picayune compared to what’s happening regularly now, where schools are arranging for far higher payments to European teams just to get players bought out of contracts so they can come to college.

At the same time, the NCAA is in an incredibly difficult spot. Their executives and attorneys understand that each time the line of demarcation moves, as it has here, it chips away at the NCAA’s ability to ensure college students are playing college sports, not people who bypassed that opportunity and want to suddenly turn back because NIL has become so lucrative.

But they also see a legal environment with a deluge of eligibility cases, with some judges granting sixth and seventh years to players. Gonzaga’s Tyon Grant-Foster, who will turn 26 before the NCAA tournament, was originally denied eligibility but granted a preliminary injunction in Washington to play this season — seven years after he enrolled in junior college.

NCAA officials would argue nothing major has changed from a policy standpoint; rather, what’s different is the willingness of schools to recruit and enroll those players — and, of course, the willingness of those players to come play college basketball. Before there was big NIL money involved, it just wouldn’t have been something to consider. Now, it’s often a far more lucrative path than trying to make it to the NBA from the G League.

The combination of schools looking for players outside the traditional recruiting realm and judges eroding the NCAA’s ability to enforce eligibility rules has led everyone here, whether they like it or not.

Sports attorney Darren Heitner theorized Friday in his “Newsletter, Image, Likeness” blog on the legal landscape in college sports that this could also be part a calculated strategy by the NCAA to present college basketball as “one option within a broader professional and semi-professional basketball market that includes the G League, international leagues and other alternatives” to make the argument that the NCAA isn’t a monopoly.

“If the NCAA can establish through these eligibility decisions that college basketball and professional leagues occupy the same competitive labor market, it will fundamentally reshape the antitrust analysis in ongoing and future cases,” Heitner wrote.

The question, though, is to what end? Is the point of this enterprise now merely about legal survival while college basketball transforms into a place for guys stuck in the NBA developmental system to come and get a big payday?

That doesn’t seem right. And even if the NCAA can get some kind of protection from Congress — it’s been six years and counting since the organization started down that path, so no guarantees there — it’s hard to imagine some of this stuff just comes to a hard stop. Once the window opens this wide, it’s difficult to close.

Maybe it’s time for college basketball and the NBA to sit down and figure out a different model, one that perhaps mimics hockey’s system where players can be drafted but play in college until they decide to sign with their pro team.

Imagine a world where nobody has to enter the NBA Draft, they’re just automatically in the pool of draft-eligible players the year they turn 18 years old. At that point, decisions about what’s best for their development would take place collectively between the NBA franchise that drafted them and their college team. Perhaps you could even construct a system where a drafted player can join the NBA or G League team on a provisional basis after the college season and then go back to college if they feel like they need another year.

Of course that would require a lot of work, cooperation and collective bargaining changes on the NBA side. But it makes a lot more sense than college coaches who need another body to bypass a high school kid and instead recruit a grown man who never intended to go to college with a six-figure payday.

If they’re simply going to wait around for Congress to deliver guardrails, Nnaji is going to be the first of many former NBA Draft picks to find their way back to college basketball and make the NCAA look like it has no rules at all.

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There aren’t many days in the history of women’s sports more significant than Sept. 20, 1973.

Despite the garish spectacle of Billie Jean King being carried into the Astrodome on a chariot by barely-dressed men, then presenting Bobby Riggs with a baby pig to symbolize his chauvinism, tennis’ iconic Battle of the Sexes is remembered — and rightly so — as a serious turning point in the fight to legitimize female athletes in the eyes of a male-dominated culture.

Set against the backdrop of Title IX’s passage the year before and the establishment of the WTA Tour months earlier, 90 million people worldwide watched King’s victory on television. It turned her into a global superstar. It validated women’s tennis as a commercial enterprise, opening the door for other women’s sports to do the same. In many ways, it turbocharged the women’s liberation movement into households and workplaces across the country.

“(It) was really political,” King told BBC Sport in a recent interview. “It was rough, culturally, what was coming with it. I knew I had to beat him for societal change. I had a lot of reasons to win.”

For comparison’s sake, the next Battle of the Sexes on Dec. 28, 2025 is, uh, not going to be that.

If anything, the match between world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka and tennis bad boy Nick Kyrgios — in Dubai, of all places — is a nakedly cynical, agency-arranged cash grab representing little more than the cultural rot of social media and the same addiction to meaningless theatrics that gives our overstimulated brains the dopamine hit we now wake up craving.

“Hollow and unserious and feckless while still being nugatory and pointless,” longtime commentator and soon-to-be International Tennis Hall of Fame inductee Mary Carillo wrote in an e-mail to Yahoo Sports. “But in the larger sense it’s a useless, invalidating, inane piece of flapdoodle.”

It might be unserious, but it comes with a serious question: Given that women’s tennis is well past the point of needing gimmicks to gin up attention, would it potentially be damaging if the No. 1 player in the world and a four-time Grand Slam champion loses to a tennis carnival barker who has played six official matches since the start of 2023?

Evolve, the sports agency that represents both players and set up the event, is billing the match as an homage to the legacy of what happened 1973.

But not only is that ridiculous on its face, it’s completely unnecessary.

For one thing, this isn’t even going to be a real tennis match. Whereas King and Riggs played a standard best-of-five set format — a huge part of what made King's 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 victory so meaningful — the dimensions of the court for this one have been modified so Sabalenka has about 9-percent less real estate to defend on her side of the net. Also, both players will only get one serve, which probably plays to her advantage since Kyrgios — one of the biggest servers in tennis history — will be forced to play a bit safer.

So even if Sabalenka wins, the modified rules ensure an automatic asterisk.

“It’s more of a show — it has nothing to do with the Battle of the Sexes, with what Billie Jean King versus Bobby Riggs meant,” former No. 1 Garbiñe Muguruza said recently on the Spanish COPE podcast.

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Let’s face it, there’s also the misogyny of it all, starting with where the match is going to be held.

While the United Arab Emirates constitution guarantees equal rights in areas like education, employment and property, human rights groups have identified several areas of concern, especially regarding domestic violence and family laws that do not protect women equally and do not align with Western values.

There’s also the Kyrgios issue.

In 1973, Riggs was a 55-year old has-been and country club hustler whose garden-variety, Archie Bunker-style chauvinism was both cartoonish and reflective of a society in transition.

Kyrgios reflects modern society’s thirst for a circus from his on-court meltdowns, to his prodigious but largely wasted talent, to a guilty plea in Australia for pushing his ex-girlfriend onto the pavement during an argument in 2021 (the magistrate in the case did not record a criminal conviction) to an episode in 2024 where he had to disavow self-described misogynist and controversial influencer Andrew Tate over social media activity that became the source of complaints during Wimbledon when he was working as a broadcaster for the BBC.

At this point, with Kyrgios’ tennis career hanging by a thread, it’s hard to escape the feeling this is one last shot at a giant payday, using a vapid instrument that will accomplish nothing except once again validating his ability to generate attention.

“In whatever we do in today’s day and age there’s always going to be negative noise, there’s always people trying to tear us down,” he said in an interview with UK-based Talk Sport. “I have ultimate respect for Aryna. We have a good friendship. It’s done in a good way. We’re going out there to compete and we’re entertainers, going to have some fun, but we want to play a hard match. That’s it. She’s the No. 1 player in the world, she’s very capable. There’s going to be millions of people watching this. If I don’t get a good start it’ll feel like the world’s on my shoulders.

“Think about all the good that’s going to come from this.”

Good for his bank account, maybe. But for tennis? For the popularity of women’s sports? For the advancement of women’s rights in the Middle East?

Please.

“It’s quite funny to see how some people say that,” Sabalenka said on Piers Morgan Uncensored. “We’re just bringing our sport to the next level and bringing the show and the visibility this event got in the last couple months is incredible and we’re going to compete and fight and it’s going to explode our sport a bit more.”

Sure, if you believe all attention is good attention.

But the beauty of being a top-ranked women’s tennis player in 2025 is that you don’t need to do stuff like this. Largely thanks to the foundation King laid for the WTA Tour and pushing for equal prize money at the Grand Slams, Sabalenka has made $15 million this year alone in on-court earnings. Women’s tennis can stand alone as a premiere sport in practically any country in the world.

In fact, the whole point of what King accomplished that day in 1973 was building a sustainable sport so that women didn’t have to do anything like that again to get respect as athletes.

To reduce that legacy to crass commercialism and social media views is disappointing, but fitting.

“The only similarity is one’s a boy, one’s a girl,” King said. “That’s it. I hope it’s a great match. I want Sabalenka to obviously win. It’s just not the same.